Thursday, October 9, 2014

In his recent blog post (Why Did Civilization Lag in Africa?
9/19/2014- http://www.unz.com/isteve/why-did-civilization-lag-in-africa)HBD leader Steve Sailer makes a number of
claims, most of which are contradictory or easily debunked. He illustrates why HBD
or hereditarianism lacks credibility when dealing with people who actually use scholarship and
logic, as opposed to easy one liners that entertain the gallery. This post will
demonstrate 8 grounds on which HBD or "hereditarianism" lacks
credibility, all illustrated by one of its leading pitchmen, Steve Sailer.
These 8 weaknesses include:

1-- Lack of up to date knowledge on history, anthropology
and economics

2-- Weak logic and analysis in general, including frequent contradiction by its own "supporting" references

3-- Use of name-calling, labeling etc as a substitute for
clear, logical analysis

4-- A penchant for building dubious or false strawmen to
"refute"

5-- Frequent use of easy one-liners as a substitute for
logic or analysis

7-- A penchant for covering the above weaknesses by playing
the "political correctness" claim card

8-- Using of "supporting" references that actually debunk or contradict proffered claims

SAILER OPENS BY TAKING ECONOMIST ACEMOGLU TO TASK: He says:

"In Freakonomics in 2012, superstar economist Daron
Acemoglu and his sidekick James A. Robinson used a Q & A with readers to
promote their book Why Nations Fail and its all-purpose theory that “extractive
institutions” rather than “inclusive institutions” were to blame for anything
bad that ever happened anywhere in the history of the world."

^^This is a laughable strawman- and a typical
"HBD" approach- create a bogus strawman to "refute."
Acemoglu et al do not blame "extractive" versus "inclusive"
institutions as an all purpose explanation for " anything bad that ever
happened anywhere in the history of the world."

ACEMOGLU ON HIS BLOG ANSWERS A POST BY A REPUTED
"HAITIAN" ABOUT BACKWARD BLACK PEOPLE- eerily similar to other web
posts by "concerned black people" who conveniently set up
"heridiatarian questions." The use of a "black" persona is
apparently to disguise true intent. The questioner seems somewhat like the fake
"black militants" who conveniently appear on assorted HBD websites to
spout the most extreme "revolutionary" rhetoric.. setting up strawmen t be
conveniently "refuted" by "the facts." Right....But let's play along for now...

Q. I am from Haiti,
a country that you guys speak of quite often. I moved here to the States about
ten years ago for school. Anyway, I’ve always wondered why countries dominated
by blacks have done so terribly (and I am not trying to make us look stupid)?
My questions stems from the fact that even within Haiti,
the wealthier people are the sons and daughters of ex-pats from Europe
or Syria, but
in the larger picture, countries heavily dominated by blacks tend to fail. I
don’t know many countries in the world where blacks are at the top of the
social pyramid; it is concerning. Does it have to do with slavery; more than
slavery, education? And how would it be solved in a 30-year plan for example?
-Jean-Marc Davis

Acemoglu replies- then Sailer takes umbrage:

A. The fact that
nearly all countries which are headed by black people are poor is a
coincidence.

There is nothing
intrinsic about black people that makes such countries poor. Just look at Botswana
— it is run by and for black people, but it is one of the great economic
success stories of the past 50 years. The same is true of several Caribbean
countries, such as the Bahamas.
The reasons for this are several-fold. Let’s focus just on Africa.
Historically (before European influence), Africa developed
extractive institutions for reasons that are not well understood.

For instance, the
fact that the construction of centralized states in Africa
lagged behind Eurasia is not really understood. This
history of extractive institutions then created a terrible vicious circle in
the early modern period. First, the slave trade destroyed states and made
economic institutions more extractive, and the poverty of Africa
then allowed it to be colonized by Europeans. This left a legacy of extractive
institutions with which African countries have been struggling since
independence. But there is nothing inevitable in this process. Fifty years ago,
you would have asked “How come every country run by Asians is poor”?

We don’t ask that
because we know that many Asian countries have changed their development paths.
They, of course, had advantages Africa did not have,
such as a history of centralized states. More broadly, there is nothing
inevitable about the fact that the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain
and soon after spread to Western Europe and these
countries’ superior technologies allowed them to colonize large parts of the
world. This was the outcome of a long contingent process of institutional
change. This process did not happen in Africa, but that
has nothing to do with black people but rather different histories of
institutions and different shocks. In the book, we illustrate this by talking
about Ethiopia.
In 400AD, Ethiopia
looked very similar to states in the Mediterranean basin, but then it experienced
very different shocks and while these other societies changed, Ethiopia
got stuck.

SAILER DIDN'T LIKE ACEMOGLU'S EXPLANATION- APPARENTLY IT DID
NOT SUPPORT STANDARD, SIMPLISTIC HBD "RACE" DISTORTIONS. He says:

"Obviously, this explanation wouldn’t strike anybody
better informed and more objective than Daron Acemoglu, the Malcolm Gladwell of
MIT, as terribly persuasive."

Actually this statement demonstrates that it is Sailer HIMSELF who is poorly
informed, and knows little about current economics, anthropology or history.
Sailer objects because the hard scholarship of Acemoglu and Gladwell of MIT
debunks the standard simplistic "HBD" race card line ( or racial
"evolution" line) of virtuous 'Caucasoid genes" as the source of
all light and good. If such mundane facts as institutional governances, colonial
structures that delivered massive power to corrupt following leaders, economic
patterns, transport etc etc are mentioned, well heavens! - it must be wrong- a product of dastardly
"political correctness" or "unpersuasive." In the simplistic
HBD universe, only the race party line gets the top spot..

Having no credible analysis- Sailer then plays the "political correctness" card
in advance: He says:

"(Of course, I often wonder if implausibility isn’t
considered a virtue these days. If the point is to demonstrate your True Faith,
then Acemoglu and Robinson’s opening tactical salvo of “The fact that nearly
all countries which are headed by black people are poor is a coincidence” isn’t
as funny as it would sound to the Man from Mars. If the point is not science
but witch-sniffing, then making assertions so lunkheaded they are bound to
raise a smile in anybody with an active brain is brilliant, even if it’s
simultaneously stupid)."

Actually here again Sailer demonstrates his talent for
name-calling, but when it comes to actual logic, facts and analysis, he
falls woefully short, again demonstrating his lack of grasp where current
economics, history and anthropology is concerned. It is all too easy for HBDers
to holla about "witch-sniffing" or "political correctness"
-rather than engage in credible analysis, based on hard data. In this sense,
Sailer demonstrates how HBD rests on a foundation of endlessly repeated racial
propaganda and distorted right-wing tropes.

Sailer says:

"So, rather than critique Acemoglu’s thrashings, let
me try to work out a fundamental explanation for why Africa, the home of
anatomically modern humans, was long so far behind even other tropical lowlands
such as the Yucatan."

Sailer tries his hand at "explanation" but HIS
limits and "thrashings" are readily apparent. Right off the bat his
opener is flawed. Africa was not "far behind"
other tropical places such as the Yucatan.
IN fact Africa produced some of the most sophisticated large
scale civilization in human history- in the NileValley/Nile Basin. And within that valley,
almost 20% of Egypt
falls within the tropical belt. Its fundamental peopling was by tropical
Africans (Zakrewski 2004, 2007; Yurco 1996, 1989, Keita 2005, 1992; Lovell
1999; et al) not the "Middle Easterners" or Europeans" or
Asiatics (like Greeks, Romans, Assyrians, Persians, Hyskos, Arabs etc) who were
to come in significant numbers later. Here's what conservative anthropologist
Nancy Lovell, someone recommended by Mary Lefkowitz herself has to say about
that:

"There is now a sufficient
body of evidence from modern studies of skeletal remains to indicate that the
ancient Egyptians, especially southern Egyptians, exhibited physical
characteristics that are within the range of variation for ancient and modern
indigenous peoples of the Sahara and tropical Africa.. must be placed in the context of hypotheses
informed by archaeological, linguistic, geographic and other data. In such
contexts, the physical anthropological evidence indicates that early NileValley populations can be identified as part of an African
lineage, but exhibiting local variation. This variation represents the short
and long term effects of evolutionary forces, such as gene flow, genetic drift,
and natural selection, influenced by culture and geography." --Nancy C. Lovell, " Egyptians, physical
anthropology of," in Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, ed.
Kathryn A. Bard and Steven Blake Shubert, 1999). pp 328-332)

Sailer says:

"I’ve put up a picture above of an immense ruin I
visited five years ago, the theater in Miletus in what’s now southwestern
Turkey, because there are a lot of ruins in this world. Turkey
is full of ancient ruins (as are Mexico,
Guatemala, and Peru)."

Sailer puts up a picture of a big ancient ruin (a stadium)
and uses this as a base to opine HBD boilerplate about African "backwardness."
This is typical of the naive "eyeball anthropology" seen in HBD to distort African history, and also illustrates a pattern of distortion and racial animus that is at the foundation of HBD, despite pious protests to the contrary. In any event however, two things undermine the boilerplate HBD narrative of anti-black distortion:
(a) the African peoples of the Nile Valley/Nile Basin and further south (parts of the Nile Basin are "sub-Saharan" by the way) produced structures equal or greater,
and

(b) such impressive stadium-like ruins are themselves scarce in ancient
"hotbeds" of Caucasoid purity- northern Europe for example. They are
scarce to non-existent in the territory of virtuous Nordics or Germanics-
appearing neither or barely in ancient Germany,
Sweden, Holland,
France etc etc.The British Isles are
no different- where are the pyramids of Wales
for example? And megalithic construction with astronomical functions make one
of the earliest appearances in human history millennia near the border of
today's Sudan-
an indeed is seen as a key formative influence in Egyptian civilization by
credible scholarship- Nabta Playa. Megaliths by the way appear in ancient Central
Africa before Stonehenge.

Stonehenge in England is one of the few big monumental
constructs in northern Europe, but this is far exceeded or more than matched in the Nile Valley and the Kingdom of
Kush in the Sudan- itself a "sub-Saharan" entity that produced its
own ancient pyramids and burial complexes, despite a resource base that had a
fraction of what was available to their Egyptian cousins on the much vaster,
more populous territories of the northward Nile. Reader even mentions Askum in the Horn of Africa, which by the way is "sub-Saharan" - a place with plenty of "big ruins."
(QUOTE:"The early Askumites built in stone. They erected massive carved monoliths over the graves of their leaders (one was 33 meters long and weighed over 700 tonnes, arguably the largest single piece of worked stone ever hewn." (Reader, pg 208).

In short, "big
buildings" (Sailer's facile "HBD litmus test") are scarce in antiquity among
supposed paragons and pace-setters of goodness and light - northern Europeans. And as demonstrated by Sailer's own "supporting" reference, Reader's book, "sub-Saharan" Africans produced some of the biggest structural items in the world. Curious isn't it? Sailer says such is non-existent, but his "supporting" reference, Reader, flatly contradicts his claims. This is a typical pattern with HBD.

Sailer says:

"Why this meandering reminiscence of mine about a
random ruin in Turkey?
Because sub-Saharan Africa has remarkably few ruins for
its immense size. This fact is not well known. It is so hazy in the
contemporary mind that Henry Louis Gates managed to sell PBS on a six episode
miniseries about African ruins called The Wonders of Africa without,
apparently, anybody in PBS management calling his bluff about the lack of
wonders that his camera crew would wind up documenting in one of the most
boring documentary series of the 21st Century."

This is typical laughable "HBD" stuff. Sailer
is unable to analyze the data- as noted above- lacking the knowledge and
ability to evaluate current scholarship in history, anthropology and economics.
As regards his "comparison," the same could be said of northern Europe-
it contains remarkable few ruins for its immense size and supposed
"Caucasoid DNA" blessings. And "Sub-Saharan" Africa
includes the kingdom of Kush,
which had its own writing system, iron industry and monumental construction.
The southward movement of the Sahara obscures this fact,
making numerous African cultures far to the north "sub-Saharan. Kushite civilization
documented by credible scholars along these lines easily debunks Sailer's
claim.

Sailer says:

"The only book I’ve read that has wrestled seriously
with the implications of sub-Saharan Africa’s relative
lack of ruins is John Reader’s extraordinary Africa:
Biography of a Continent. Reader’s argument is that the reason there are few
ruins is because there was little wealth in sub-Saharan Africa before outside interventions."

Actually Reader does not address "ruins" as such much
in his book, but he contradicts Sailer's claim by showing a number of places in
Africa with "ruins." Nor does he say lack of
ruins is due to lack of wealth. Sailer's rant is simple dissimulation and
distortion, deliberately misrepresenting Reader's scholarship to push his brand
of "HBD" propaganda. Curiously for someone who claims to have read
the book Sailer cannot produce one direct quote- instead posting second hand
paraphrases from book reviews as seen below. But perhaps a quote would
undermine Sailer's sleight of hand. Indeed, Reader does manage to mention monumental
construction in Africa's NileValley which includes the Kingdom
of Kush - itself a sub-Saharan
entity with administrative links deep into the Sudan
and trade links as far afield as Central Africa. Indeed, numerous African cultures once far north have been made "non-Sub Saharan" by the steady southward spread of the Sahara, but that cannot hide the central facts about the African civilization of the Nile Valley/Basin that was Kush or 'Cush' (in Biblical text). QUOTE:

"the wealth and power of Meroe
at its height during the last few centuries BC is not at all surprising,
particularly since the island
of Meroe was also
richly endowed with both iron ore and the hardwood timber needed for charcoal..

Among the monumental ruins of a civilization lying today
on the island of Meroe, huge mounds of slag testify to the scale of iron
production that powered its rise and ultimately brought about its downfall...

"Even iron-smelting technology, so powerful a
formative element of the Meroe
civilization, is older in West and central Africa
and therefore cannot have been introduced from Meroe..
any residual feeling that Egypt
or Nubia
must have been responsible for developments in sub-Saharan Africa
will have to be abandoned and Bantu-speaking people accepted as innovators in
their own right."

--Reader (pages 191-199)

Uh oh. Wait a minute. Didn't Sailer earlier tell us Reader
said Africa lacked wealth? In fact, Reader made no such
claim. Sailer simply lies about what is being said. Indeed Reader (pages
191-199) tells us about some very wealthy places in Africa,
places with plenty of monumental ruins, the very wealth that Sailer claims
Reader says is "non-existent." Reader even mentions Askum in the Horn of Africa, which by the way is "sub-Saharan" - a place with plenty of "big ruins." (QUOTE:"The early Askumites built in stone. They erected massive carved monoliths over the graves of their leaders (one was 33 meters long and weighed over 700 tonnes, arguably the largest single piece of worked stone ever hewn."(Reader, pg 208). In short, Sailer misrepresents and
distorts Reader's book.

And let's look at alleged pace-setting European "role models." Have THEY been free of "outside intervention"? Not at all. In fact, Europe has been a massive borrower, copier and user of "outside intervention" - from the key plant and animal domesticates that today feeds most of Europe's population, to advanced metallurgy and other techniques, to writing, to cultural products nowadays deemed "European" - like the influential Christian religion. When has Europe ever been free of "outside intervention" dear reader? Crickets chirping.. I thought so...

The Nile Basin from whence numerous African civilizations sprung is itself a "sub-Saharan" entity touching not only Egypt and Nubia, but also the Sudan, Ethiopia East African areas like Kenya and even into Central Africa

Sailer quotes from a book review not Reader: He says:

"The Economist’s 1998 review of Reader’s book noted:

Much of Africa’s
history is explained by its fragile soils and erratic weather. They make for
conservative social and political systems. “The communities which endured were
those that directed available energies primarily towards minimising the risk of
failure, not maximising returns,” says Mr Reader. This created societies
designed for survival, not development; the qualities needed for survival are
the opposite of those needed for developing, ie, making experiments and taking
risks. Some societies were wealthy, but accumulating wealth was next to
impossible; most people bartered and there were few traders."

But all this book review demonstrates is that Africa has suffered from numerous environmental difficulties that has hindered large
scale wealth over a wide area. No surprise there on this old news, and this is nothing unusual.
White "role models" in parts of Europe lacking
good soils or having environmental disadvantages, such as Ireland,
or the Balkans did not accumulate much wealth either. Africa
is nothing special in this regard. Reader's tome actually UNDERMINES some
standard HBD race-mongering distortions attributing large scale civilizations
of wealth as the product of "Caucasoid" virtue or purity. And such "purity" does not exist as modern scientific studies show, and touted "role models" are themselves massive borrowers and copiers of ideas, materials and techniques from outside Europe.

Sailer says:

In fact, there were few people. Whereas the rest of
the world tended to butt up against Malthusian limits on the amount of food
that the burgeoning population could wrest from the ground, tropical Africa
had plenty of land but strikingly few people. The problem, according to Reader,
was that African humans had a hard time outcompeting other living things in Africa,
such as diseases (falciparum malaria and sleeping sickness, most notably) and
giant beasts (such as elephants).But too high a density of population, such as in cities, made
people sitting ducks for diseases borne by mosquitoes and tsetse flies. The
germs in tropical Africa were even worse than the
megafauna.

It is hilarious that Sailer "discovers" Reader,
but he seems not to realize how Reader undermines many of his own beloved, and
simplistic HBD race notions. It is not "Caucasoid genes" that are
important. Much less dramatic, (and a bit too complicated for the HBD
race-mongering "faithful") are such mundane things as geography,
climate etc etc- points long observed by Thomas Sowell in his
"Culture" trilogy some years before Reader, or his Ethnic America
(1981) almost 2 decades before Reader's tome. .

Sailer again quotes another book review-

Thomas Pakenham’s 1998 review of Reader’s book in the New
York Times explains:

"Why did Africa
south of the Sahara fare so badly in the last three
millenniums? Reader explains Africa’s handicaps in terms
of disease and climate. He contrasts the happy colonists who ”by leaving the
tropical environments of the cradle-land in which humanity had evolved . . .
also left behind the many parasites and disease organisms that had evolved in
parallel with the human species.” It is telling again that Sailer does not give any direct quotes from his supposedly "supporting" reference, but instead puts forward paraphrases and reviews of someone else- a typical HBD pattern as well. And while Reader acknowledges the handicap of tropical diseases and parasites, (the spread of hrses for example was hindered by the tsetst fly), but he notes that despite these obstacles, (and contrary to Sailer's "HBD" claims), sub-Saharan Africa did produce its own elaborate, powerful and wealthy civilizations.

Sailer says:"In the
African Garden of Eden lurked enemies all the more potent because they were
invisible: the malaria bug and other lethal organisms. The liberation of Africa
from these enemies began with the period of European exploitation and has
continued, somewhat haphazardly, as European drugs are exported to Africa."

This is hardly news. In fact Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs
and Steel also mentioned the role of debilitating diseases. It is ironic that
Reader is here in the same company with Diamond, and yet in a number of assorted blog posts,
Sailer rails furiously against Diamond for an "environmental"
outlook that fails to uphold favored "racial" explanations. Yet
ironically, we have Sailer a decade and a half later, "discovering"
and agreeing with Diamond's "environmental" observations, apparently
not fully recognizing how they undermine his current and earlier "race
explanation" positions.

Sailer says:

"So, tropical Africans couldn’t learn to live in
dense urban populations, with all the advanced trades made possible by the
concentrations of city life. They largely remained small villagers scratching a
living from the ground."

Laughable. What Sailer fails to realize is that "tropical Africans" would include the
Africans of Egypt, Nubia and Kush (in present day Sudan- and a "sub-Saharan" entity),
where there were indeed recognizable urban populations. But lack of
urbanization or slow urbanization elsewhere is nothing special. As late as the 1700s Early Industrial
Revolution era, China
for all its advances only had about 3-4% of its population urbanized (W.
Easterly 2014 The Tyranny of Experts. 146) As late as 1914, only 14-15% of Russia,
a massive land, was urbanized. London as late as the 1500s had a mere 50,000 inhabitants, dwarfed multiple times by contemporary Cairo on the African continent of the same era. (Urban World History: An Economic and Geographical
PerspectiveBy Luc-Normand Tellier 2009).

Reader also notes (page 225) that complex urban societies arose in West Africa a millennia before Arab arrival. QUOTE: "West African history was 'unshackled from the Arab stimulus paradigm in the 1970s.. wherein the transformation to a complex urban society began 1,000 years before the arrival of the Arabs." and that cities like Jenne-jeno circa 800AD that already had numbers rivaling contemporary London. Other scholars put it in perspective showing African urbanization depending on the era was quite comparable with or exceeding other cities in several European kingdoms: Algiers in the 1600s had 150,000, Mekenes in Morocco 200,000, Kano had about 75,000 in the late 1500s, and Niani, capital of Mali had 60,000 inhabitants in 1324 (James Tarver 1996- The Demography of Africa- pg 93). Reader also notes that the development patterns of some African cities are nothing special- Chinese urbanization showed similar patterns- QUOTE: "Remarkably similar settlement processes appear to have characterized the urbanization process at sites of similar age in China, suggesting that this alternative to hierarchal social system and coercive centralized control strategy of classical definition may have occurred worldwide.."

Note- the quotes in red above undermining his claims are from Sailer's own "supporting" reference.

Sailer says:

"Also, in contrast to the rest of the world, where
sexual restraint had its Darwinian advantages in avoiding the Malthusian Trap,
tropical Africans found it advantageous to procreate as thoughtlessly as an NFL
star like Adrian Peterson, Antonio Cromartie, or Travis Henry. Children weren’t
likely to starve because their working mothers could grow enough food for them
in the thin tropical soil (without fathers needing to do the heavy lifting of
plowing, as on continents with better soil)."

Sailer's delivers some facile one-liners about the NFL's 'Adrian
Peterson' but they can't cover for his lack of knowledge and shallowness.
For one thing, growing food on thin tropical soils is anything but "easy." One can only laugh at Sailer's nonsensical notions- but they are typical of HBD. And "Sexual restraint" is rather unimpressive among European "role models," as witnessed by their embrace of "gay" marriage, leading
and high levels of child porn consumption and production, and
disproportionately high levels of child molestation. And in fact high child
mortality rates in historical Europe did encourage
"thoughtless procreation," with the simple logic that the more children
on hand, the more chance some might survive that mortality.

Logic is not Sailer's strongpoint. He seems not to realize
that his own one-liners, popular as they may be to the "HBD" gallery
undermines his position. Just as Europeans found it advantageous to have plenty
of children to ride out high child mortality, so also Africans found it
advantageous to have plenty of children to ride out the impact of the
debilitating wave of tropical diseases that cut down their children. But notice
the racial animus of Sailer coming through. Its not simply that his analytical
skills or logic is lacking, but he demonstrates the racial double standards and
animus that lies at the heart of HBD. When European have plenty of children
that's OK. When Africans do, well it must be due to "lack of sexual
restraint."

Sailer says:

And the children were probably going to die of
random diseases anyway, for which no amount of paternal investment could
protect them before modern medicine.

This too is dubious on Sailer's part. For one thing, the
high procreation rates are themselves a parental investment to ensure some
survivability into the next generation. And even children who eventually perished had to
be fed or cared for. Furthermore as
credible scholars have long shown, Africa has the lowest infanticide rate in
the world, far below supposedly more virtuous European or Asiatic "role
models" (QUOTE: "Africa has been reported
to have a lower incidence of infanticide than all of the other
continents."

As far as the United States, the massive, often heart-rending searches of black ex-slaves for their children, with some people roaming hundreds of miles to recover them, testify to "parental investment" of blacks, as they struggled to put together family lives ravaged and brutalized by white southern slave regimes. And after the Civil War these people strived to create stable family structures so often destroyed under the white slave regime- indeed every census taken between 1890 and 1940 shows black marriage rates exceeding that of whites. This pattern began to break down after WW2, particularly with the rise of the white run and initiated liberal welfare state of the 1960s, but more fundamentally the process of urbanization that destroyed relatively more conservative rural mores. Such breakdown under urbanization happened with the white Irish as well (Sowell 1981), but see, that's OK. Its only when a black man shows up that a double standard emerges. The "negative parental investment" Sailer references is
not only dubious, but is a standard part of the narrative of HBD racial animus against blacks- a continual campaign
of propaganda and distortion.

Sailer says:

Is Reader’s late 1990s theory of the difference
between Africa (and thus Africans) and the rest of world
true? It’s similar to Jared Diamond’s theory in the contemporary bestseller
Guns, Germs, and Steel, but is far more detailed, plausible, and interesting.
Unlike Diamond’s rather airy theory, it has the advantage / disadvantage of
explaining much that we see in modern America
as well. Reader didn’t really want to draw out the modern implications in the
manner of J.P. Rushton, but it’s pretty obvious reading his book that there are
connections between prehistoric Africa and inner city
black America.

Here Sailer builds a laughable strawman, again colored and
infused by racial animus- and the usual one-liners. Note how said one-liners
about "inner city black America"
substitutes for logic. Perhaps it finally dawns on Sailer that Reader's
observations are similar to what Diamond also argues, arguments that Sailer
himself in various posts rejects and fights against. Sailer touts Reader's
"readibility"- but it is Sailer whose reading comprehension is
lacking for Reader undermines Sailer's own simplistic "HBD" narrative
on several key points.

Even more ironic, Sailer's touted reference devotes 7 pages to the standard HBD notion (and one beloved of JP Rushton and the HBD 'faithful') of black natives lolling about at "ease" in tropical environments- a distorted notion derived from old 19th century race tropes but also in part from 1960s studies of the !Kung Bushmen or San of the Kalahari which posited an "original affluent society" among hunter-gatherers (Lee 1966). Lee's work has been superseded by more recent research, but unfortunately it has been twisted by HBDers beyond recognition, and scholar Reader debunks such distortions thoroughly.

In fact, far from alleged "ease" and "affluence", the African !Kung faced a bitter struggle, posting exceptionally low fertility rates, below that even of other surrounding African groups and high child mortality rates (40 percent of kids died before reaching maturity)- again well exceeding other nearby Africans. A small population size in an area that could have supported much more also gave misleading impressions of "affluence" - and the harsh calculus of survival demonstrated severe nutritional stress on the !Kung at various times of the year- individuals for example could lose 6 percent of their body weight in the dry season, and hard-pressed native women suffered a pounding physiological stress disrupting reproduction - with intensity matching that of modern female athletes. So much for "easy" alleged "tropical affluence" by "the natives." QUOTE:

"The economic effect of a skewed population structure and low dependency ratio suggest an alternative to the Utopian images of affluence and leisure which have been drawn from Lee's researches among the !Kung. Perhaps the !Kung were not such a perfect iconic example of hunting and gathering community living in harmony with the environment after all.

The large number of old people, and the bulge moving up the population pyramid could indicate that the population was larger in the past; that a decline in the birth rate had occurred over the past few generations, and that the apparent affluence of the current generation was simply the consequence of there being fewer people exploiting resources that were capable of supporting many more... the measure of the !Kung's viability as a population lay not in the number of old people, nor in the apparent affluence of its providers, but in the number of infants that were born and raised.. Here again, the statistics were remarkable: the fertility rate of the !Kung recorded Nancy Howell was exceptionally low. Whereas women in Africa generally had an average of six live births during their reproductive lifespan, !Kung women had only three on average. Furthermore, 40 per cent of their offspring died before reaching maturity and Howell calculated that the !Kung's high mortality and low fertility gave them population growth rate of below 0.5 per cent per year - less that one-fifth of the rate for Africa as a while,, not even half that of the United States.. the !Kung lived in conditions of greater stress than first impressions had suggested. Images of Utopia and the original affluent society began to fade..

'Lee's studies of !Kung diet and caloric intake have generated a misleading belief.. that the !Kung are well wed and under no nutritional stress.' On the contrary there were months every year during which their lives were predictably arduous and stressful; there were years when the mongongo harvest failed. Eighty individuals weighted at intervals over the course of twelve months, lost up to six percent of their body weight during the dry season.. A revaluation of !Kung women's foraging and subsistence routine identified a degree of physiological stress matching that which disrupts the reproductive function of female college athletes. Even the much-vaunted food-sharing practices of the kung were found to be rather less egalitarian than previous accounts indicated."
--John Reader 1997, Africa: A biography of a continent. pp 118-125

Sailer says:

In the decade and a half since Reader published his
highly readable Africa: Biography of a Continent, has any
economist, evolutionary theorist, or geneticist directly grappled with testing
his model? Not that I’m aware of. Instead, we have goofs like Acemoglu
dominating our intellectual life, such as it is. Isn’t it about time to give
serious attention to John Reader’s theory?

One can only laugh out loud here, and Sailer should hope he
does not get what he wishes for. To the contrary, Reader undermines Sailer's
own simplistic "HBD" narrative on several key points. This decade and
a half old book has observations that are old news, like the role of
debilitating vectors in hindering African development. And people like Morris
(Why the Rest Rules 2010) and Kaplan (Revenge of Geography 2012) have added more data that
demonstrates the key role played by geography, a role much more significant than simplistic race memes
and distortions that ate the stock in trade of HBD.

It is also significant that Sailer excludes much else of what Reader says about geographical handicaps or problems in Africa (such as poor access to navigable rivers, climate like rainfall levels, coastlines lacking many natural harbors, thin tropical soils etc etc) to focus on diseases and parasitical infections. These other factors are very important in other credible analyses, but Sailer conveniently ignores most of them. Why? Because a distorted focus on "diseases and parasites" again ties into the racial animus that underlies HBD- you know- (roll ominous bogeyman soundtrack and "Ebola" video) those "darker types" stricken with yucky diseases. But here's Reader again, HBDer Sailer's own "supporting" reference, on the advanced food production in Africa and how environmental disasters crushed early advances. When these disasters receded, African food production, including some of the world's most productive agriculture (on the Nile) surged ahead.

“Dating from more than 15,000 years ago, the evidence from the Nile valley is arguably the earliest comprehensive instance of an organized food-producing system known anywhere on Earth. Given time, this pioneering system might have developed into the stupendous civilization that ruled ancient Egypt for two and a half millennia from about 5,000 years ago. But it could never be. Disaster struck the Nile Valley as its population reached a peak, and by 10,000 years ago occupation density had plunged to a level only slightly above that known for the time of the Wadi Kubbaniya site. The cause of the calamity originated more than 2,000 kilometers to the south, in central Africa at the headwaters of the Nile, where climatic amelioration which followed the last glacial maximum had brought a very marked increase in rainfall.. Around 13,000 years ago, heavy and persistent whih had already flooded even the desiccated Kalahari basin with a number of large lakes moved steadily northward.. The effects downstream were catastrophic. From a sluggish river flowing through shallow braided channels, the Nile was transformed over a period of five hundred years (12,000 to 11,5000 years ago) into what has been called the 'wild' Nile. Extremely high floods were only the beginning of the problem.. With the Nile now flowing through a single deep channel, the extent of the floodplain was severely reduced. The quantities of available plant foods declined.. The levels to which the human population had soared could not be sustained,.. Conservative assessments conclude that regular annual rain began to fall on the region from about 11,000 years ago; additional rain in the valley can hardly be viewed as compensation for the devastating floods its inhabitants had suffered.."
--Africa: A Biography of the Continent, by John Reader, 1997, pp. 155-156

So there you have a major environmental impact documented by his own "supporting reference" that shaped culture and civilization on the continent, but Sailer skips it entirely, because no doubt, it does not offer the right grist for the "negrodamus" propaganda mills. HBDers pride themselves on "racial reality." They should just come clean and admit that racism or racial animus is at the core of their project. No need to hide and obfuscate or whine about "political correctness" when debunked. Just declare your animus right up front - so it's out in the open and people know where you are coming from.

.Summary

As demonstrated above, Sailer, a leading figure in the HBD
movement, illustrates several weaknesses of HBD/ hereditarianism and why it
lacks credibility. To wit:

1-- Lack of up to date knowledge on history, anthropology
and economics

2--
Weak logic and analysis in general, including frequent contradiction by its own "supporting" references

3-- Use of name-calling, labeling etc as a substitute for
clear, logical analysis

4-- A penchant for building dubious or false strawmen to
"refute"

5-- Frequent use of easy one-liners as a substitute for
logic or analysis

6-- An underlying and persistent racial animus against blacks and racial
double standards

7-- A penchant for covering the above weaknesses by playing
the "political correctness" claim card

8-- Using of "supporting" references that actually debunk or contradict proffered claims

Perhaps one final quote from the "supporting" reference, John Reader's book- Africa: Biography of a continent" summarizes the bankruptcy of numerous HBD approaches, including not only standard propaganda claims about fundamental human advances originating in Europe, but the pattern of "supporting" references that actually debunk the arguments of those who proffer such "references." As he does on numerous places, Reader debunks several cherished HBD notions. Here's another one- QUOTE:

"The Katanda sites are at least 75,000 and possibly as much as 90,000 years old, an age which demands revision of some entrenched Eurocentric views on human cultural development. Hitherto it had been widely believed that although modern humans had evolved in Africa and first migrated from the continent around 100,000 years ago, the manufacture of specialized tools and the development of sophisticated cultural practices such as complex economic strategies, large scale social networks, personal adornment, and an expanded use of symbols in art and daily life arose in Europe, central Asia, Siberia and the Near East between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago. The Katanda evidence contradicts this view, pushing back the invention of specialized tools at least 35,000 years and making Africa the origin not only of anatomically modern humans but also of modern human behaviour."
--John Reader, 1997, Africa: A Biography Of The Continent, p139